Ferrari has ruled out changing the concept of its Formula 1 car despite a plea from Carlos Sainz.
Pre-season optimism has been replaced with frustration at the Scuderia, as Red Bull has pulled ahead while the SF-23 currently sits fourth in the pecking order behind Mercedes and Aston Martin.
Ferrari’s main issue is race pace, with the car proving much more tyre hungry than its rivals, and Sainz conceded the team was also too conservative with its performance goal.
“I think with the change of regulation, the cars becoming slower, we thought that this was normal that the car would become a bit more peaky, less downforce,” he explained in Australia.
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“And we thought the targets were going to be okay and we were going to be fast.
“We got to the first test and we saw immediately people haven’t suffered from the change regulations, they are much quicker than last year, and this left us thinking that we clearly have something that we didn’t get right.
“The good thing is after our analysis of these races, we see where the weaknesses is, we know why the car is peaky, we see it on the data, and we are pretty certain we can develop in the right direction.”
Since the start of the current regulations last year, Ferrari has pursued a ‘bathtub’ sidepod design with the top surface hollowed out to redirect airflow to the beam wing.
However, given the gains Red Bull has made, Sainz feels the Italian team needs to reconsider its concept.
“At the moment Red Bull is superior everywhere,” he declared. “Superior in qualifying, in race pace, in straight-line speed.
“Superior in medium and low-speed corners. They’re superior with tyre management, they’re superior over the kerbs.
“It shows we clearly need to change something, we need to go onto something very different from where we are now.
“I think extremely good performance at the start of last season made us keep pushing with this concept.
“But I think we realise now that Red Bull has a clear advantage everywhere and that we need to start looking to our right and to our left.”
However, despite rumours of a potential concept change at Imola, Ferrari chief Fred Vasseur has denied that is the case.
“We have a flow of updates that will come for Miami, Imola, and Barcelona. At each race, we’ll have an update on the car,” he was quoted by Crash.net.
“It’s not a B-car if that is what you want to say. We won’t come with something completely different. We will continue to update this one and we’ll try to update massively.
“We are sticking to the plan. We have made some adjustments in terms of balance and behaviour, and it was much better in Melbourne, and we’ll continue in this direction.”
The Race has claimed, however, that Ferrari will in fact evaluate its sidepod concept once these upgrades are fitted later in the coming races.
